Closure term modeling of the volume averaged transport equations for open cell foam

Abstract

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.

A computational effective analysis method for the hydrodynamic phenomena which occur in foams is possible by applying an up-scaling technique such as the volume-averaging method. This, however, results in additional terms which describe the influence of the microscopic transport phenomena on the macroscopic scale of analysis. Closure of the averaged equations is obtained by describing these terms as functions of averaged variables. In this paper, the closure modeling is done, based on first principles. The local viscous and pressure forces which act on the solid matrix are computed directly and related to classical porous properties, i.e. permeability and inertial factor. A flow regime dependency for the parameters is found and can be explained on physical grounds.